“Thou hast loved to speak all words that may do hurt.”
(THE 52ND PSALM)
I briskly informed my preparatory school headmaster I was an unbeliever when I was about twelve, which would put it in 1963 or 1964, just after John Profumo and Mandy Rice-Davies had burst into my life and well before Winston Churchill’s burial. I do not think I volunteered the declaration. I think he had suspected that something of the kind was fermenting inside me, since I was in many ways the tolerated and indulged school troublemaker, expending his subversive energies on complaining about the food and remodeling the school newspaper. (I am told it took years to recover.)
He asked the question expecting the answer he would get. No doubt he had heard it many times before from bumptious outsiders like me. He avoided argument and made a mild riposte about how the deaths of those I loved might later alter my view, which I scorned at the time but which I never forgot and later found to be accurate. I did nothing about it and made nothing of it for some time afterward, being too busy passing some rather difficult examinations, changing schools, and picking my way clumsily through the dismal swamps of early puberty.
Although I was extremely well educated by the standards of 2010, I was hopelessly ill-equipped by the measures my grandfather (an accomplished and fearsome teacher and an uncompromising Baptist) would have applied. In my early teens he would sometimes stomp around his living room—where he liked to shave toward midday with bowl, brush, and open razor—deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. “What is sociology?” he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.
This was no longer the age of faith, so my Bible knowledge was lamentable when compared with that of boys of my class brought up twenty years before—let alone with that possessed by my Anglican aunt and my Calvinist uncle, both of whom knew the King James Version more or less by heart and read and re-read it regularly.
Some of my older teachers, rigorously schooled in a more serious faith, did their best to instruct us as they had been taught. The classes were still referred to, without embarrassment, as “Scripture.” Later they would be called “Divinity.” Later still, there would be “Religious Education.” In modern Britain the young are taught about the religious beliefs of others, as if they were an anthropological peculiarity. While teachers are quite ready to be prescriptive about contraceptives (good) and illegal drugs (acceptable if taken with care), they are generally reluctant to urge Christian belief on any of their charges. Some Roman Catholic schools take a stronger line, and Muslim schools certainly do, but those of the established Church of England cannot be relied upon in such things. In a state-maintained Church of England elementary school close to my home, the religious education class recently consisted of instruction in how to draw a mosque. A private school known to me, strongly Anglican, devoted several classes for ten-year-olds to the functions of imams and rabbis, but none to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England.
By comparison with this, my Christian education was intensive, purposeful, and single-minded. I still recall classes on St. Paul’s travels, which must have been identical to those taught fifty years before, and I cannot get out of my head a mnemonic, itself absurdly Edwardian, which was supposed to fix in my head the route Paul had taken around Asia Minor. “Ass Papa!” it ran, “I Like Dates.” The last bit referred, I can still recall, to the cities of Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. The rest is lost to me, but I am struck by the fact that the teacher expected us to know and remember such details of Holy Scripture as a matter of course.
Too often we were left to our own devices, supposedly “searching the Scriptures,” a misguided scheme, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of small boys, that involved pasting Bible quotations in an exercise book while supposedly also looking them up and learning them. We did, in my memory, much more sticking bits of paper in exercise books than reading, let alone learning. But our general familiarity with the Bible would still be astonishing in a child of today.
There can have been very little religion at home. I can hardly recall going to church during the school holidays. We were not a church-going family. But since this was quite normal for our class of persons in the 1950s and 1960s Britain, it never struck me as odd, and I never looked for an explanation. The same was true of my parents’ marriage, in the wholly secular Caxton Hall in London. My father had most certainly had a Christian religious upbringing—the boys were brought up Baptist, the girls in the more Protestant part of the Church of England. He was familiar with the liturgy and hymns of the Church of England from his own mother’s affiliation and from the Royal Navy’s weekly observances at sea. Since then, I have guessed that my mother, whose childhood is a mystery to me but whose mother was partly and unobservantly Jewish, did not have any church background at all and decided to leave her children’s religious upbringing to the schools. But she too—especially during her wartime years in the Women’s Royal Naval Service—would have picked up enough from public ceremony to be able to cope with the (in those days ) numerous occasions when our schools required a basic knowledge of Anglican practice. I do not think my father or my mother were actively hostile to faith. I certainly was not withdrawn from Christian religious instruction, an absolute lawful right for any British child if the parents wish to exercise it. I suspect my parents just felt more comfortable for others to be doing this, given their own childhoods and lack of a common faith. But this lack of religion at home has had an odd but powerful effect on my attitude toward Christmas (and, to a lesser extent, Easter).
Christmas at my West Country boarding school was a long festival of anticipation, pleasing to the senses of taste, hearing, and sight. Once Remembrance Day (also known as Armistice Day) was over, we began to prepare for the still-distant feast. We rehearsed a great Carol Service. We were invited to stir the enormous school Christmas pudding, so large and deep that the smaller boys were in severe danger of falling into its rich mixture of dried fruits and spices. The term ended with various happy festivities, including an exhibition where we could show off the items (often quite intricate) that we had spent the term making in woodwork classes, and a Christmas party of a wonderfully old-fashioned English kind, only really possible in a large country house, filled with games and cake until we were exhausted and sated with sugar. This party was always preceded by a long cold walk in the December gloom while normally dour members of the school staff decorated the normally austere hall.
The next day we caught the train—for me a long journey in that strange, exciting light that floods the skies of England when the sun is low in the sky, ending with the unmixed delight of homecoming after dark, the extraordinary pleasures of a soft bed, privacy, and adults who were not teachers. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a few days later, were always an anti-climax after this. To this day I prefer the anticipation of Advent to Christmas itself, and the season is strangely incomplete without a long train journey through a cold landscape. As for Easter, I had to teach myself to observe it when I returned to the faith years later. It never fell during the school term, and although the Easter Story, told at any time, is powerful and haunting, the festival itself had no significance for me except as a time for stuffing myself with chocolate eggs.
Imagery of the Last Judgment was still powerful currency to us. As I will explain later, its power would return one day to surprise me. One of my teachers—actually by far the best of them—would seek to frighten us into learning by warning us that we would suffer the fate of the Foolish Virgins when the time came for the decisive examinations we had to take at the age of thirteen. For us, the Last Judgment was superseded by the fearsome, unyielding tests that would decide the outcomes (or so we believed) of our entire future lives. Pass, and success and security would be ours. Fail, and we would be lost outsiders. I certainly believed it. There would, so the teacher predicted, be wailing and gnashing of teeth and casting into the outer darkness, thanks to our idleness and sloth. He urged us to keep private notebooks of French vocabulary bearing the title “Fuel for the Lamp,” to remind us of what might happen if those notebooks were empty. Recently, as I studied the elaborate carvings of the Wise and Foolish Virgins on the west front of the Cathedral at Berne, I found myself thinking unbidden of French irregular verbs and Latin vocabulary.
The Christian conservatism of my schools did not protect me from the rather Victorian faith in something called “science” that was then very common. Perhaps this is because Christianity was not implied in every action and statement of my teachers, whereas materialist, naturalistic faith was. This faith did not require any great understanding. Mainly, it was just an assumption, a received opinion we all accepted. At the age of fifteen, despite an almost complete inability to learn the most basic parts of the school science curriculum, I was wholly satisfied that evolution by natural selection—which I did not understand because it was not thought necessary to explain this holy mystery—fully explained the current shape of the realm of nature.
(These days I know, with complete certainty, that there are a number of things about which I have no idea at all, nor does anyone else. This knowledge would have greatly surprised my fifteen-year-old self.)
I likewise thought—when I was solemnly first introduced to it at the age of thirteen—that “science” had fully explained the motions of the planets, the law of gravity, and the mysteries of time. Anything that had not yet been explained would no doubt soon be discovered. There were no mysteries.
Because we could observe gravity in action, we somehow knew what it was. Nobody then mentioned that its operation, especially in empty space, simply cannot be explained. All was settled. Just learn the Table of Elements, your species, your elementary biology, and your formulae, and that was that. The fact that the “laws” dealt with in this subject are all accounts of what did happen, rather than rules about how things should happen, was passed over in silence. Why and how were silently but inextricably confused. The use of the majestic word “laws” curiously turned the mind away from speculation about whose laws they might conceivably be or why they might have been made. Science, summed up as the belief that what could not be naturalistically or materialistically explained was not worth talking about, simply appropriated them.
Why then should any reasoning, informed person need the idea of God? What would he have explained that was not known among the Bunsen burners, the jars of acid, and the pickled embryos in brownish fluid, in the Science Block? Perhaps if I had been taught science with a little less confidence and told that these claims were open to argument, I might have been more interested in it. (Though I doubt it. My type of school-boy thought it a little demeaning to be “good at” the useful and workaday subjects.). But I should stress that I was not actually taught these articles of the materialist faith, let alone the arguments that continue to rage around them. I was simply given the impression by adults that these things were the case, and that this was all settled forever.
It was the faith of a faithless age. I had no idea, then, quite why so many of the older generation had set their faces so hard against religious belief. I was quite shocked when I later discovered the true state of affairs. They did not know half the things they claimed to know. Their faith in science was an attempt to replace the Christian faith, ruined by wars and disillusion, with a new all-embracing certainty.
I also recall a very curious thing, which would later change without my realizing how important it was. During my atheist period, I became an enthusiast for total rationality. I happily embraced the cold, sharp metric and decimal systems, discarding the polished-in-use, apparently irrational but human and friendly customary measures—which my generation was the last in England to learn. In a similar desire for mental tidiness, I sought out and preferred buildings without dark corners or any hint of faith in their shape. I was comforted by the presence of modern cuboid structures, preferably of glass and concrete, in any town. I longed for a world of clean, squared-off structures, places where there was no darkness.
I did not know exactly what I was seeking or avoiding, but it was well described in John Buchan’s story Fullcircle. A character who lives in a seventeenth-century manor house (as did Buchan himself) muses by his library fire:
In this kind of house you have the mystery of the elder England. What was Raleigh’s phrase? “High thoughts and divine contemplations.” The people who built this sort of thing lived closer to another world, and thought bravely of death. It doesn’t matter who they were—Crusaders or Elizabethans or Puritans—they all had poetry in them and the heroic and a great unworldliness. They had marvellous spirits, and plenty of joys and triumphs; but they also had their hours of black gloom. Their lives were like our weather—storm and sun. One thing they never feared—death. He walked too near them all their days to be a bogey.
As a small child I had been rather interested in death, in graveyards and tombstones. They were not concealed from me as they would be now. The English parish churches of those days had generally not cleared away their graves, altar tombs, and gravestones and turned their churchyards into tactful gardens. Many smelt sweetly of slow human decay. I had little doubt about what was going on beneath those mounds and stones. I had once found a dead mouse, buried it with a short funeral, and soon afterward morbidly dug it up to see what had happened to the corpse. I have never forgotten the sheer purposeful energy of the fat, gray worms I found and the ravenous speed with which they were working. It was almost violent.
I knew far more about death—as a process—than I knew about sex or swearwords, of which I was almost completely ignorant up to the age of twelve. We recited a gruesome rhyme in the playground—seemingly passed on by a magic process from one generation to another—that began, “Never laugh when a hearse goes by, or you will be the next to die,” and went on to describe the process of bodily corruption in appalling detail, most of which I can still remember word for word. Does this still continue? I doubt it. But we thought it all jolly and normal.
Having spent long hours in churches peering at memorial tablets, and having walked through many churchyards past worn and leaning stones and worryingly cracked altar tombs, I immediately understood Pip Pirrip’s odd ideas about gravestones at the opening of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, a book that continues to have a near-biblical force for me, especially when I consider my treatment of my parents. The gravestones did indeed seem to possess characters. And I was specially, personally terrified when I first read the scene when the young hero finds himself trapped behind an occupied—and rotten—coffin in the burial vault in J. Meade Falkner’s tremendous novel Moonfleet. I felt as if the author had personally intended to frighten me.
Strangely, as I entered my teens, I no longer felt that close familiarity with death. On the contrary, I sought to ignore it. I shamefully refused to go to my grandfather’s funeral and was wrongly allowed to get away with this dereliction—which I have regretted more with every year that has gone past, as I feel that fierce old man’s scorn for the modern world coursing through my own veins and hear with perfect clarity his beautiful Hampshire accent in my imagination. I perhaps made up for this later when I attended the burial of his oldest son, my uncle, also a rigorous Calvinist. This took place amid a deluge of icy rain, under a typically black English summer sky, in a cemetery drearily overlooked by the walls of Portsmouth prison and so waterlogged that the mouth of the grave had to be held open with metal props and planks lest it closed with a giant squelch before the service was over.
The hymns and prayers were pure gloom, calculated to spread despond among the living. A relentless pastor intoned as the coffin was lowered: “Our dear brother here departed now goeth either to Heaven or to Hell. There is no scriptural warrant for the existence of any other place.” I have to confess—and I am sure my kind and gently humorous uncle would not mind my saying so—that the occasion was so impossibly miserable that it was very nearly funny. I do not think I could have stood it at all during my godless teens, but the fault would have been in me, not in the ceremony.
In the heat of adolescence, when immortality is most attractive, I actively loathed anything that suggested the existence or presence of death. I now positively preferred a world in which death was distant enough to be a bogey, where tombstones were cleared away against the wall, where any sign of dusk or gloom was always banished by enormous windows of plate glass, sparkling light reflected off pale wood, and night defeated by strong electric lamps. I longed to see churches converted into useful libraries or other secular buildings, having first been scoured clean of every last trace of superstition and ritual. I rejoiced at the destruction or desecration or purging of structures with a religious character. They made me feel uncomfortable and resentful. I had a similar loathing for paintings, sculptures, music, or poetry that used religious idioms. This attitude toward painting, in particular, was to end later in an unexpected way.
My moral positions, in the same way, became fierce opposites of what had always been taught. I regarded marriage as something to be avoided, abortion as a sensible necessity and safeguard, homosexuality as very nearly admirable. I renounced patriotism, too—so completely that I would one day shock myself and my fellow revolutionaries with the chilly logical conclusion of this decision. I began by embracing the silly pro-Soviet pacifism of nuclear disarmament, with its bogus claims of moral superiority over the conventional warmongers. In my last disastrous, obnoxious months at my Cambridge boarding school, I learned how to shock my teachers—from sitting up during chapel prayers, to putting my feet on the seat in front of me in the school theatre, to getting caught breaking into a government nuclear shelter. At the end they were all—perhaps especially the best of them whom I had so completely disappointed—more than glad to see the last of me. At the time I had absolutely no idea that I might have been making any kind of mistake. I was in fact rather pleased with myself. I have come to think that this readiness to live entirely in the present—in which we spare ourselves any self-reproach and fail completely to see ourselves as others see us—is a metaphor for the Godless state, in which we simultaneously ignore the experience and warnings of our past and the unknown, limitless dangers of our future.